Compare this with the experience of Gopi Krishna, a typical yoga adept.
1. Like Tesla, Gopi Krishna had a series of visions and illuminations over a period of years.
2. Like Tesla, Gopi Krishna simultaneously suffered a series of mysterious illnesses, almost died several times, and occasionally became painfully sensitive to all sensations.
3. After the final vision, Gopi Krishna became a psychic prodigy, able to write poetry in several languages which he couldn’t read or speak normally.64
We seem to see the same mutational process occurring in both cases, slightly modified by cultural influences. Take it on a broader scale:
1. In every tribe there are occasional shamans who are prone to visions and illuminations.
2. These shamans usually begin having their visions during or right after a prolonged illness which nearly kills them.
3. After recovery, the shaman has odd psychic abilities — “wild talents,” as Charles Fort said.65
The whole process can be condensed to the formula; near-death plus “rebirth” on a higher level.
In the course of my investigations, I have undergone a number of occult initiations and have become aware of the basic similarity of such rituals in all traditions. This is the pattern of death-rebirth which even today appears symbolically in the Roman Catholic Mass and the Masonic “raising” ceremony. The Investigator is betraying no secret when we say that, in serious occult orders, such performances are not mere rituals but real ordeals. Insofar as possible within the law, the candidate is often brought to a state of terror similar to the emergency condition of the nervous system in near-death crises. What occurs then, and is experienced as rebirth, is a quantum jump in neurological awareness. In Leary’s terminology, new circuits are formed and imprinted.
Obviously, the first shamans had no teachers; they simply went through the illness-rebirth transition accidentally, as it were. Later, schools of shamans developed techniques (psychedelics, rituals of terror, yoga, etc.) to catapult the student into such experience. In most of these schools there is great reliance on an entity or entities of superhuman nature who aid in the initiatory process, sometimes for years. (“A real initiation never ends,” Crowley said once.)
Tesla, incidentally, remained a strict Materialist all his life. When his biographer pointed out to him once that Tesla’s own ESP had been demonstrated on numerous occasions, Tesla replied that ESP also had a material medium.
Obviously, the whole shamanic process of near-death and rebirth on a higher level will become commonplace by the 1990s, if Leary is right and we have then both a Simulated Death pill and an Immortality pill.
Other starry signals
In 1927, Jorgen Hals, a Norwegian radio engineer, received signals which have never been explained; in the 1950s, various Russian scientists tried to prove that the Hals signals were of interstellar origin, but this theory is still being debated and no consensus has emerged.
In October 1971, L. George Lawrence, an American electronics engineer, was investigating the “Backster effect” (telepathy in plants) in the desert near Mount Palomar, California. He was using special equipment, designed by himself, considerably more sensitive than Backster’s polygraph. To his astonishment, Lawrence picked up signals which seemed to come from the skies, in the region of the Big Dipper. Unwilling to publish such a finding at first, Lawrence spent several months checking his equipment for bugs and redesigning to rule out other possible explanations. In April 1972, the experiment was repeated in the Mojave Desert. The same results were obtained. Lawrence’s report to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington says:
An apparent train of interstellar communication signals of unknown origin and destination has been observed. Since interception was made by biological sensors, a biological-type signal transmission must be assumed. Test experiments were conducted in an electromagnetic deep-fringe area, the equipment itself being impervious to electromagnetic radiation. Follow-up tests revealed no equipment defects. Because interstellar listening experiments are not conducted on a routine basis, the suggestion is advanced that verification tests should be conducted elsewhere, possibly on a global scale. The phenomenon is too important to be ignored.66
Carl Sagan of Cornell University, along with others concerned with interstellar communications, have invested most of their time and energy in radio signal reception. All the current projects of this sort, those funded or seeking funding, are based on the assumption that interstellar communication would involve the radio-wave energies. Lawrence’s results suggest that there might be a considerable amount of cosmic communication going on that involves the “biological” or cellular level of consciousness.
Lawrence is now building a gigantic Stellartron to seek further starry transmissions.
The Backster Effect and other related considerations, Lawrence says, lead to the idea that psi is part of a “paranormal matrix” — a unique communications grid which binds all life together.67
To accept the possibility of Lawrence’s signals is to raise the charge of “electromagnetic chauvinism,” which Dr. Jack Sarfatti has made against Carl Sagan and most others who are interested in the search for interstellar signals. Sagan, Sarfatti says, should not assume that such signals must be carried by the electronic technology we already know. This chauvinism, Dr. Sarfatti points out, is as naive as assuming advanced races would speak English.
Consider the Higher Intelligence contacted by Jack Parsons, the American rocket pioneer who co-founded Cal Tech and is reputed to have contributed as much basic innovative technology to aerospace as Goddard or von Braun. Parsons, who was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, back in the 1930s-40s when Aleister Crowley was still alive and acting as Outer Head, subsequently published The Book of the Anti-Christ — a strange, beautiful, revolutionary document which, like Crowley’s Book of the Law, was allegedly dictated by a Higher Intelligence. This entity is described by Parsons only as “most Holy and beautiful”: it urged Parsons to declare war on “all authority that is not based on courage and manhood . . . the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police,” and called for “an end to restriction and inhibition, conscription, compulsion, regimentation and the tyranny of laws.”
Part Two of this strange document urges all truth-seekers to practice Crowleyan sex-yoga: “Concentrate all force and being in Our Lady Babalon. Light a single light on her altar, saying Flame is our Lady; flame is her hair. I am flame.” Etc. Babalon, in Crowley’s Tarot, is The Star, which Kenneth Grant says is Sirius.
Grady McMurty, an old friend of Crowley and Parsons, and currently Caliph of the Ordo Templi Orientis in the United States, has kindly placed in my hands various manuscripts of O.T.O. private publications during the 1940s. In one of them Parsons states his devotion to the shamanistic-psychedelic quest in poetic terms that might have seemed extreme even to Crowley. The poem begins:
I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
marijuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never know sadness but only a madness
that burns at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman, ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine.
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine.
This was printed in the February 21, 1943 issue of The Oriflamme, journal of the O.T.O., two months before Hofmann discovered LSD.
Parsons died in a laboratory accident in 1949. According to Kenneth Grant, Parsons’ last year was devoted to the attempt, with a mistress, to conceive a moonchild — an entity magickally separated from earth-influence at the instant of conception and from then on dedicated to higher, outer-space influences. (Crowley describes this operation in his novel, Moonchild. To my knowledge, it has not been successfully performed to date.)
Jack Parsons’ life, midway between Crowley’s and Leary’s, was a testament to the faith: it is time to get off this planet. For his countless contributions to ae
rospace science, Parsons is honored by having a crater on the moon named after him.68
The footsteps of the Illuminati
One day, browsing in a bookstore, I came upon Gurdjieff: Making a New World, by J.G. Bennett. Guess my state of mind when I came upon the following passage:
After Gurdjieff died I was asked by some of the old pupils to write a commentary on Beelzebub. When I had written a few chapters and sent them around for comment, almost all agreed that it would be a mistake to publish them. If Gurdjieff had intended his meaning to be readily accessible to every reader, he would have written the book differently. He himself used to listen to chapters read aloud and if he found the key passages taken too easily — and therefore almost inevitably too superficially — he would rewrite them in order, as he put it, to “bury the dog deeper.” When people corrected him and said he surely meant “bury the bone deeper,” he would turn on them and say it was not “bones” but the “dog” that you have to find. The dog is Sirius the dog star, which stands for the spirit of wisdom in the Zoroastrian tradition.69
Sirius again. “Coincidence,” says the Skeptic, one more time. Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the book in question, concerns extraterrestrial Higher Intelligences who intervene repeatedly on Earth to accelerate evolution here. But, of course, that’s just a story . . .
Or is it?
J.G. Bennett, in another book on the Gurdjieff teachings called Is There Life on Earth?, claims that Gurdjieff was initiated into a mystic society, unnamed, which began in Babylon around 4500 B.C. Grant also traces the Crowley tradition back to Egypt and Babylon around that time.
“Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence,” mutters the Skeptic; but is there a growing uncertainty in his voice?
Wait. There’s a lot more to come. In July 1975, I published an article about all this in Gnostica, an occult newspaper. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Edward Gardiner of the Detroit Film Collective. Mr. Gardiner wrote that he attended the Fourth International Festival of Yoga and Esoteric Sciences in Dallas. Dr. Douglas Baker, in a lecture, said that Sirius is the Ajna center of a galactic being and our sun is the Heart center. Our planetary evolution depends on raising the energy from the Heart (our sun) to the Ajna (Sirius).
Dr. Baker represents the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame H.P. Blavatsky, based on alleged transmissions from a Secret Chief named Koot Hoomi. That Gurdjieff was educated by the Sufis is now generally accepted. Crowley was directed by a Secret Chief named Aiwass. I would estimate that about 90 per cent of the occult groups in the Western world today are wholly or partially derivative from Blavatsky or Gurdjieff or Crowley, who together make up the indispensable Big Three of 20th century occultism. And now we have all three of them tied in, one way or another, with Sirius.
Of course, if shamans of any school are going to develop delusions about stars, they are likely to pick Sirius, which is the brightest star in the sky and hard to ignore. It is also in the constellation of the Dog, “man’s best friend.”
Nevertheless, such is the repressed gullibility of even the most hardened Skeptic, I have found myself wondering once or twice about new meanings in the ancient Zen riddle, “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?” And, on rereading Joyce’s Ulysses for the first time in several years, the Metaprogrammer was struck by the Black Mass in which the souls of all the saved chant “Gooooooooooooood” while all the souls of the damned chant “Doooooooooooooog.”
This palindrome (God-Dog) also appears in The Book of the Law, remember, in the question, “Is a god to live in a dog?” My fantasy leaped and I asked myself why Joyce set Ulysses in spring 1904, the same time that Crowley was receiving The Book of the Law. (19 + 04 = 23 . . .)
The same palindrome, again, appears in Chapter One of Dr. Leary’s High Priest, published in 1968. The chapter is titled “Godsdog.”
Coincidence? Synchronicity? Higher Intelligence?
Then Brian Hanlon, San Francisco UFOlogist, called my attention to a book called Other Tongues, Other Flesh, by George Hunt Williamson.
Williamson, an early 1950s Contactee, claims to have met some flying saucerites from Sirius. He prints vast huge chunks of their language — the “other tongues” in his title — and I found that a few of the words were almost identical with some words in the “angelic” language used by Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and other magi of the Illuminati tradition. For instance, Williamson transcribes one of the words he received as leshtal; Crowley has “lashtal.” This is more striking when we remember the two Naval officers who got “affa” (nothing) from the same “angelic” language.70
Williamson also informs us that the Sirians have been in contact with Earth for “several thousand years” and that their allies here use as insignia the Eye of Horus — the origin of the Illuminati eye-in-triangle design.71
Like every other Contactee, Williamson may, of course, be suspected of hallucinating or just of being a damned liar, Even the most hard-headed skeptics, however, must be a bit puzzled if we ask a few questions at this point, such as: what are the chances of Williamson, either as a hallucinator or as a hoaxer, picking up words in the “angelic” language, known only to advanced students of Cabala? Well, maybe he could have read a bit of Cabala in his time; sure. But what are the chances, by coincidence or whatever, that two Naval Intelligence officers of high security rating should also, in a separate Contact, get a word in the same language? How could Williamson have known that Crowley was in any way connected with Sirius in 1953, when he wrote his book, since Kenneth Grant was the first to link Crowley and Sirius, in 1973? Was it only by coincidence of lucky guessing that Williamson picked the eye-in-the-triangle (used by Crowley and the Illuminati) as the alleged symbol of the secret society in contact with Sirius? Was it only another coincidence that that symbol was used by Adam Weishaupt and Thomas Jefferson? And is it another coincidence that Dr. Baker, the Theosophist, should declare Sirius “the third eye” of a cosmic being?
When Illuminatus was being written (1969-1971), I had no interest in Sirius at all and no delusions about contact with extraterrestrials. But we now find that both the number 23 and the eye-in-the-triangle motif — the two most mysterious enigmas in that novel — have a long history of linkage with the Illuminati-Sirius mystery. I didn’t know that when working on Illuminatus — but evidently something that is part of my mind or in communication with my mind did know it.
Dope and divinity
After all this, I began to restudy Gurdjieff avidly. Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff’s major prose work, concerns interstellar Higher Intelligences who seek to aid and advance evolution on Earth. I had previously regarded this framework as mere allegory, a convenient scaffolding for Gurdjieff’s serious teachings, but now I began to wonder if he were hiding his real secret out in front where nobody would think to look for it. A Purloined Letter from Sirius?
I was even more intrigued by the step diagram of the vibratory levels. Above mankind, Gurdjieff placed “angels,” “archangels” and “the Eternal Unchanging.” Dr. Kenneth Walker, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and a hard-headed scientist, has an odd comment on these higher beings in his book, A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching:
These squares represent higher entities than ourselves of which we have no knowledge at all, and we can call them angels and archangels if we like . . . Some other members of the St. Petersburg group had agreed to equate “angels” with planets and “archangels” with suns . . .72
If we substitute for “planets” and “suns” the concept “intelligent, more evolved entities in other solar systems” we have the 1973 Leary theory of interstellar telepathy.
Gurdjieff’s system, in brief, holds that human beings are evolving from mammalhood to immortality. Almost all of us, he says repeatedly (and with evident joy in annoying our self-esteem), are still on the mammalian level — robots controlled by conditioning. We think we are conscious, but we aren’t. We are asleep, hypnotized, sleep-walking — the metaphors vary, but th
ey all mean that we can’t see outside our conditioned reality-tunnel. When we begin to awaken, we perceive that the world is nothing at all like the myths and superstitions our society has imposed on us. And, if Gurdjieff’s allegory be taken literally, a group of Interstellar Intelligences, who have already evolved to stages less mammalian than ours, are watching us all the time and, occasionally, intervening to accelerate our evolution toward their level.
In this context, let us recall that there are two great mysteries in anthropology, and that they do not concern minor matters at all but are, rather, two of the biggest questions we can ask — namely, how did language begin? and how did civilization begin? There are dozens of theories, but not one hypothesis has yet achieved anything close to majority acceptance. Talking to anthropologists, I often get the feeling that each of them has a personal theory different from all the others. We simply do not know.
But language and civilization are functions of the symbolizing or semantic faculty, which also produced that other great mystery: shamanism — out of which grew religion and the whole web of artificial (human-made) Ideas which differentiate us from the other land-mammals.
The cumulative evidence in such books as Dr. Andrija Puharich’s The Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Robert Graves’ revised fourth edition of The White Goddess, Professor Peter Furst’s Flesh of the Gods, Dr. Weston LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult and Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, etc., leaves little doubt that the beginnings of religion (awareness of, or at least belief in, Higher Intelligences) is intimately linked with the fact that shamans — in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, in Africa — have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.
The pattern is the same, among our cave-dwelling ancestors and American Indians, at the Eleusinian feasts in Athens and among pre-Vedic Hindus, in tribes scattered from pole to pole and in the contemporary research summarized by Dr. Walter Huston Clark in his Chemical Ecstasy: people take these metaprogramming substances and they soon assert contact with Higher Intelligences.
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 17
